Taking A Chance On Thomas - A Model For Success

WASHINGTON — Something tells me the black freedom movement will never be the same

after the ascension of Judge Clarence Thomas to consideration for Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court.

Long before there was a ''civil rights'' movement in the 1950s and '60s, there was a freedom movement to liberate black Americans, first from slavery, then from second-class citizenship and most recently from economic dependency, the plight of the so-called urban ''underclass.''

The tenacity of Thomas, buoyed by favorable opinion polls, helps make the world safe for other conservative black voices, tipping the balance once again for a freedom movement that has been in a constant state of tension between competing concepts of self-help and outside help, from the days of Martin R. Delaney and Frederick Douglass in the mid-1800s, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois in the early 1900s to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the 1960s.

Although numerous self-help advocates have maintained prominence (Minister Louis Farrakhan comes to mind), post-'60s liberal orthodoxy has exalted government help to a position of primacy, and major media, always more willing to cover blacks as stereotypes than as a diverse society, played along.

All that has changed in recent days. The polls indicate that attempts to portray Clarence Thomas as a traitor to his race have failed. Most black Americans, according to the polls, either like Clarence Thomas or, at least, aren't particularly afraid of him.

With that, Thomas has helped make the world safe for black conservatism for the first time since President Richard Nixon tried to sell ''black capitalism'' in the late 1960s.

Even while Thomas was sweating out his third day of grilling on Capitol Hill, Rep. Mike Espy, D-Miss., was in a press conference across town announcing to reporters that the Congressional Black Caucus planned to ''get away from victimization and talk about expanding the opportunities'' at its 21st annual conference this year.

Espy's choice of words was significant. When black author Shelby Steele last year admonished black Americans to shed their victim-focused identity and find a better source of political and social power than their own historical ''victimization,'' liberals hammered him. Steele was a leader in a movement without followers, said Roger Wilkins. But a year later, Mississippi Democrat Espy seems to have joined the club, teaming up with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp's ''empowerment'' agenda for the poor, another popular tenet of conservatives like Kemp who have not rejected an active role for government in solving domestic ills.

''The Black Caucus is not monolithic, because the African-American community is not monolithic,'' he said. True. The Black Caucus, NAACP and other major black civil-rights groups rejected Thomas' nomination, but the black fraternal order of Elks, the Black Nurses Association and other grass-roots groups voted to support him. So did the Compton, Calif., chapter of the NAACP until its national headquarters forced it to change its vote.

History eventually may record that Thomas, standing heroically up to the barbs of his critics (including me), helped usher in a new era of glasnost - for black America and perestroika - for the black free-

dom movement, an era in which a diversity of views is encouraged instead of condemned, an era in which the validity of various strategies to bring about the final liberation of black Americans can be judged by their ability to bring results, not by their ideological correctness.

A compelling voice is telling many black Americans to ''take a chance on Clarence.'' We're going to have a conservative Supreme Court one way or another anyway, says the voice, so why not make sure at least one of its members knows firsthand the pain of racism and poverty? So what if Thomas came away from that experience with a different set of remedies than others might have?

He has done all the things proper society asks you to do (work hard, speak well, live a moral life, earn a good education, fight crime, don't be threatening, get along, go along, cultivate mentors, don't wear a chip on your shoulder), then dares white America to live up to its half of the bargain. That doesn't make him a sellout. Not yet, anyway.

Quite the contrary, when black Americans take a chance on Judge Thomas, they are taking a chance on a black paradigm for success appropriate not only for the Reagan era but also for black America's deeply moral and religious base that major media so often overlook.

I think Thomas' put-up-or-shut-up challenge to white America has earned him the respect and, in some cases, outright admiration of many other black Americans.

No wonder the liberals in the white male club known as the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee have been reluctant to challenge Thomas too vigorously.